


pools

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Wonwoo-centric - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-03
Updated: 2016-09-03
Packaged: 2018-08-12 17:31:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7943068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wonwoo was born in the midst of a typhoon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pools

**Author's Note:**

> originally written for [thekpop100](http://thekpop100.livejournal.com) to the prompt "dreams."   
> this is not the wonhui fic i planned to write but it exists now, so oh well. please be kind as i try to write this pairing ;;

Wonwoo was born in the midst of a typhoon, his right eye cloudy like the eye of the storm, his left eerily perceptive of his surroundings at landfall. In between the brief moment of a power outage and the lights coming back on, he was pushed out of his mother’s womb, and as she held him against her breast, the windows of the hospital shook with the fury of the wind, angered by how easily a life was ripped away from their clutches of disaster.

And when the night is dark, dark like that brief moment of power outage, Wonwoo closes his eye of the storm and clear left one and sinks into a shallow sleep, tossed around by the waves through his bedsheets, dreaming of the abyss of the ocean and two sharp eyes in it, staring back at him.

 

 

Joshua tells him when he’s sixteen that most hurricanes are named after women. Wonwoo thinks circles around the idea before coming up with this conclusion:

“Are you trying to say I should be a girl?”

Joshua’s quick to disagree, afraid of being misinterpreted. But he doesn’t offer any other reasoning behind the before stated, so Wonwoo thinks of something for him.

“Maybe typhoons are masculine.”

Maybe.

 

 

In the old days, people thought storms were dragons, their long, scaled bodies churning amongst the clouds, flooding their farmlands. But people in the old days also believed in despotism and chopping off heads for honorable death, so Wonwoo’s not so sure.

He’s also not so sure when he wakes up one day in the middle of the night to the sound of thunder and the insistent fist of the rain pounding against his window. Wonwoo is not supposed to be afraid of the storms, though he’d think they’d be afraid of him. When he walks to the bus stop the next day with his father’s old umbrella, there is someone soaked to the skin, sitting on the bench.

This someone only turns to look at him once his sloshing sneakers have stopped, the old umbrella between them. This someone looks at him with two sharp eyes – the abyss of the ocean and the ominous bone-feeders in the dearth of the darkness – and like in Wonwoo’s dreams, they stare back at him.

 

 

Contrary to his eyes and the pointed ends of his wet, long hair, the way Wen Junhui speaks is soft. He hums what vaguely sounds like the two beginning notes of a song Wonwoo has heard before instead of verbally agreeing. He asks, “and then?” unlike Joshua, who lets conversations lull into the silence that is the in-between of waves hitting the sand of the shore.

Maybe it is because Wen Junhui is Chinese, and an accent colors his words differently than everyone else’s. Maybe it is because he found Wen Junhui sitting at his bus stop one grey day in the onslaught of rain, letting it dance against his skin.

Maybe it is because he dreams of the abyss of the ocean, the marine snow ghosting against his cheeks, the water caressing its careful and never-ending fingers across his body – but in the place of where it should be holding his hand is someone else’s, Wen Junhui’s – soft like the way he speaks, and cutting through the midnight of the water are his eyes, sharp and staring back at him.

 

 

Storms are sensationalist. They swallow and wreck and throw it all back up and people, tiny and insignificant, are left to fit the pieces back together like a puzzle that’s too big and complex for them to figure out.

“Then what are we?” Junhui asks, far away, buoy in the distance of the tempest that is Wonwoo’s thoughts. The words come to him as if he’s underwater, holding his breath, watching things unfold before him like the rippling surface of chlorinated pool water separated him from everything real this whole time.

The eye of the storm blinks. Junhui is there, head above the water, his hand in Wonwoo’s trying to pull him up.

For once, Wonwoo feels his lungs burning.

 

 

Wonwoo was born in the midst of a typhoon and, for nineteen years, he let the storm born within him take him in the undertow – terrifyingly impassive to the surface.

Today, that typhoon spit him up. And Wen Junhui, as tiny and human and as insignificant in the face of fear as Wonwoo himself, pulled him out of the water, and they stared, with Wonwoo’s storm eye and Junhui’s sharp ones, at the ominous aftermath of all the years before.

 

 

We are awake, listening to the rain hit my father’s old umbrella between us. Waiting.

Waiting for the storm to end.


End file.
